RYNSA: WORDS

This morning I found this new video from TED in my iTunes podcast list featuring the design work of Swiss entrepreneur Yves Behar.  He is probably best known for his role in designing both the OLPC XO and the Jawbone.

Initially, I was draw to this video and his presentation because of the title: “Creating Objects that Tell Stories.”  The thinking was that this was some new invention or concept, ala the work at MIT’s Media Lab or the art of Andy Goldsworthy, for example, that would provide new methods for helping people–real world, flesh-and-blood people–to tell their stories.  Perhaps this betrays my community bias, but new technology, no matter how sexy or well conceived, is fundamentally useless as a subject.  Humanity is subject, technology is object.  That is to say that technology is merely a tool, a resource, inanimate and inert, and therefore kind of boring.  Its existence is only significant when meaning is ascribed to it by human beings.  A loptop could be a tool for storytelling, or it could be an expensive paper weight.  The key variable here is the conscious human.

There is a tendency among some in the so-called ‘creative industries’–of which I mean designers, coders, graphic designers, web engineers, musicians, videographers and editors, etc.–to overly anthropomorphize the things they create.  The language they use to describe these artifacts is beyond positive, its downright poetic!  Quite literally the words they use to express the potential of a given thing, a technological product, are words that would otherwise be relegated to the human experience.  There is no differentiation.   

Far be it from me to be the semantic police, but this lack of distinction between thing and human is problematic for me.  The sci-fi coolness of cyborg philosophizing aside–which I actually find very compelling–the expansion of language ultimately distorts, or even hides, very real human circumstances and conditions.  It makes it exceedingly difficult, moreover, for human populations to effect change where and when change is needed.  Put another way, if a television and a mother share the same descriptors, how then should we raise our children?

I believe that there is a distinct financial incentive for blurring the lines between subject and object.  At one point in the TED presentation, for example, Mr. Behar betrays his allegiances by saying, “…We bring intellectual property, you know, we bring a marketing approach, we bring all this stuff.  But I think at the end of the day what we bring is these values, and these values create a soul for the companies we work with.” (00:10:30 – 00:10:40, timecode). 

It’s that word ’soul’ that bothers me.  How can an incorporated, for-profit, private enterprise have a soul?!?  Obviously, it can’t.  But the concept is none the less pervasive in the contemporary cultural imagination.  It is a common myth, the humanity of industry.  It is an insidious trope, disseminated by wealthy companies who seek, through elaborate PR and marketing campaigns, to animate their business practice and their products.  

My criticism, to be clear, is not against Yves Behar as an individual, or his designs, or the use of those creations in the public sphere.  I’m simply uncomfortable with the terminology he and his colleagues use to describe their work.  The convergence of the organic and the inorganic may be inevitable, but the liberalization of language most definitely privileges one over the other, and we should always remember that.  We should try to be more conscientious about how we ascribe meaning to technology.

UPDATE:

For real objects that tell stories, check out the Labcast from MIT’s Media Lab, and the invention of these amazing little things they call Siftables.  Imagine the human storytelling potential of these tools!  

Lately, I have noticed that there is a significant debate among those in the field of digital storytelling: should we use the latest and greatest technological tools, or whatever is available and useful at the time?  In other words, ‘high’ or ‘low’?

For me this represents a false dichotomy, as is often the case with such stark dualisms of this kind.  Actually, when it comes to digital anything (cameras, computers, whatever) there’s really no such thing as ‘low’ tech.  This is a conceit of privileged, ‘first-world’ artists and activists who have been enjoying regular and consistent access to electricity, leisure time, and thriving new tech markets.

That being said, there is a difference between a $10,000 HD, three-chip digital video camera with XLR inputs, for example, and the disposable, point-and-shoot, cardboard and plastic cameras you can get at an American gas station for twenty bucks.  So, there certainly are useful points to be discussed from both perspectives.

One argument that is made towards using costly, ‘high’ technology in the classroom, community center, or other such environment, is the importance of introducing disenfranchised individuals to otherwise inaccessible state-of-the-art production tools.  This is of value not only for general knowledge of how high quality media, etc., is created and distributed, but also for the psychological affect of encouraging marginal folks to see themselves as within reach of the mainstream production systems.  Sometimes it is enough that people have access, or feel that they have access, to excellence, whether or not it is actually utilized.  According to the professional literature presented to me at the VCA, this ideas is referred to generically as ‘avowal,’ as in the acknowledgment or affirmation of participation or belonging.

On the other side of the debate, some CCD (community cultural development) practitioners prefer to take a decidedly streamlined, DIY approach to media education and digital storytelling.  These professionals (and amateurs, for that matter) see access to production tools as an inherently political issue, and one that cannot be divorced from larger, global economic realities.  They believe that technology, whether low or high, simply does not exist in a vacuum.  Without verging too much into Marxism, current neoliberal, capitalistic, global circumstances require distinct class divisions, wherein some folks have and other do not.  Therefore it is seen by many as a terrible mistake to facilitate the desire on the part of disenfranchised digital storytellers to participate in the mainstream media systems that have consistently sustained their marginality.  The discussion is not about ‘high’ and ‘low’ tech so much as it the political contexts of the human being who use it.

If you couldn’t tell by my writing, I am leaning towards the latter in this game of high-low.  Though I recognize the value of certain psychological impacts to CCD work of this kind, I also understand that we cannot build a movement of informed and engaged, tech and media savvy citizens on good feelings alone.  My belief thus far is that there should also be some meta-level talk around the political and economic context of digital storytelling.  If professionals in the field considered the bigger picture in this way, then I truly believe we could move beyond simplistic, materialistic debates and focus more consciously on the liberating potential of our work.  The people are more important than the tools they use.

So, my answer to the question of using ‘high’ or ‘low’ forms of technology is easy: yes!